News

A calendar activity where the child learns how to use it (by Amit Sagtani)

Another activity based on calendar where the child has to find the date corresponding to a date + some days further/before this date (by Amit Sagtani))

An activity to learn how people on a family are related and how to call this relation (started by Rajdeep Kaur on a previous GSoC, completed by Rudra Nil Basu during last GSoC)

Another similar activity with questions about family members

An extension of memory activities where the child has to match lowercase letters with their corresponding uppercase (by Aman Gupta)

The same activity in two players mode with Tux (by Aman Gupta)

The Gtk+ port and improved submarine activity where the child learns a basic overview on how to run a submarine (by Rudra Nil Basu)

The digital electricity activity where the child can use different components to create an electric schema. There is also a tutorial mode to explain how to use each component (started by Pulkit Gupta on previous GSoC, completed by Rudra Nil Basu)

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris and don't hesitate to give feedbacks.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

GCompris available from the Windows Store

2017-11-10

As the title says, you can now buy the full version of GCompris for Windows 10 from the Windows Store.

This is a good way to make it more visible and easy to find for new users. Also, if you buy GCompris from the Windows Store, you get automatic updates, you can install it easily on all your Windows systems, and it will run in a sandbox.

Spread the word !

If you prefer to not use the store, or if you only want the free demo version, you can still download it from our Download page, and buy the activation code to unlock all the activities. The store is just one more way to distribute GCompris, and to provide some income to support the project.

As usual, the full version is free on Free-Software operating systems like GNU/Linux, but for proprietary operating systems like Windows, the full version has a cost. Of course, the source code of GCompris is and will always be under a Free-Software license.

Note: the package on the store contains the version using the software renderer instead of OpenGL, since it's the only way we have for now to make sure it will work on any computer. If you really want the version using OpenGL, get it from our Download page.

GCompris Qt for Raspberry Pi

2017-10-24

We are very happy to bring you GCompris 0.81, this time on Raspberry Pi.

This version for Raspberry Pi was made possible thanks to the new "light" mode that we've been working on (read the previous post to learn more about this new rendering mode).

It was built and tested on Raspberry Pi 3, where it works good. Since it was not tested a lot yet, this first package is considered beta. Please report any issue you may experience with it. If you can try it on a Pi 2, please let us know the result. It was also not tested on Pi 1, but those probably don't have enough cpu and/or ram to run it.

The installer is on the Download page with all instructions needed to use it.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Release GCompris Qt 0.81

2017-09-26

We are happy to bring you GCompris 0.81.

This is a bugfix release to correct some issues in previous version.
All GNU/Linux distributions shipping 0.80 should update to 0.81.

Also, we introduce a new "light" version that doesn't require OpenGL to run. This means that it should work on any computer. We provide some special windows packages using this option, and also the standalone installer for Linux 32bit is using this option. In this light version, the transparency gradient on the menu is gone, and we had to adapt a dozen of activities that will look a little different in this mode, but should still be usable.

We also added a new Download page on the website, with instructions for each operating system.

Last but not least, we now have translation for Indonesian, thanks to some very nice contributors who organised a sprint in Indonesia to work on it.

If your distribution doesn't provide an updated package, use one of those standalone installers. They must be launched from command line, after adding executable permission on the file. Check the Download page for more info.Linux 32bit or Linux 64bit version

If your distribution doesn't provide an updated package, use one of those standalone installers. They must be launched from command line, after adding executable permission on the file. (based on Centos7 - will not work on distributions with older system libraries).Linux 32bit or Linux 64bit version

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

Thank you all,
Timothée & Johnny

Release GCompris Qt 0.70

2016-12-23

Hi,

just in time for Christmas, we are pleased to announce you the new GCompris version 0.70.

It is an important release because we officially drop the Gtk+ version for Windows to use the Qt one.
Everyone who bought the full version for the last two years will get a new activation code in a few days.

Also, for people who like numbers, we are beyond 100000 downloads in the google play store.

This new version contains 8 new activities, half of them being created by last Google Summer of Code students:

an activity where the child has to move elements to build a given model (crane by Stefan Toncu)

an activity to draw the numbers from 0 to 9 (drawnumbers by Nitish Chauhan)

an activity to draw the letters (drawletters by Nitish Chauhan)

an activity to find on which words a given letter belongs (letter-in-word by Akshat Tandon)

the nine men morris game against Tux (nine_men_morris by Pulkit Gupta)

the nine men morris game with a friend (nine_men_morris_2_players by Pulkit Gupta)

an activity to learn to split a given number of candies amonst children (share by Stefan Toncu)

an activity to learn roman numbers (roman_numerals by Bruno Coudoin)

We always have new features and bug fixes:

search feature by Rishabh Gupta

windows build by Bruno Coudoin and Johnny Jazeix

hint icon in the bar (used in photohunter) by Johnny Jazeix

neon build by Jonathan Riddell

we are now in openSUSE Tumbleweed repository thanks to the Bruno Friedmann

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

Release GCompris Qt 0.61

2016-08-07

After 7 months, we are proud to announce the new version of
GCompris 0.61.

One important change on the commercial side of GCompris. Bruno
Coudoin is now replaced by Timothée Giet as the commercial
entity. Timothée is a graphic artist with a long list of
contributions on GCompris and in the KDE community. After 16 years of
continuous development on GCompris, Bruno is willing to step down and
gives the opportunity to a new team to bring the project forward. For
now, all sales go to Timothée and he is in charge of the commercial
support. There are no changes in the licensing nor in the development
process which is still under the responsability of the KDE
community (Johnny Jazeix being the most active contributor).

The new activities are:

A simple wordprocessor (baby_word_processor by Bruno
Coudoin), this activity is not available on mobile platforms due to
issues with the virtual keyboard: if we only use the real keyboard,
styles don't apply and if we only use the virtual keyboard, we can't
navigate in the text, select it...

A tangram (by Bruno Coudoin). It starts with children
friendly levels to introduce each concepts little by little and end up
in the real tangram.

Explore the monuments of the world (explore_monuments
by Ayush Agrawal during SoK).

An activity in which the children must color a graph
so that no two adjacent nodes have the same color (graph_coloring by
Akshat Tandon during SoK).

Pilot the spaceship towards the green landing area
(land_safe by Holger Kaelberer).

Find the differences between the two pictures
(photo_hunter by Stefan Toncu).

Timothée Giet updated images for chess, hangman and
horizontal/vertical reading activities along with the gcompris
logo.

Lots of little fixes/improvements have been done (storing and
restoring the window's width/height at start-up, docbook updated,
levels/images bonus, adding an internal dataset for words games so
that we no more expect the network to run GCompris (except for the
voices but they also can be bundled in the binary).

I am glad to announce that GCompris is now available on the Apple iOS store (iPad and iPhone).

Two years ago I just went out with the insane project of rewriting GCompris in Qt Quick and provide a version to mobile users. Many of you joined the project and made the dream comes true. We now have a free software for children available on all major platforms and most important we give them the ability to choose a free operating system.

We now have a solid software foundation, a vibrant little community and almost completed the Gtk+ port. There are still many things to do. I would like to see more innovative activities, we can experiment, exchange with teachers and find activities that will help them and the children in their teaching.

Release GCompris Qt 0.50

2015-12-20

Just on time for Christmas and after 6 months of hard work we are
shipping GCompris 0.50. So far we have many fixes and improvements all
around in 563 commits done by 17 contributors and more than 20
translators.

Just looking at the 12 new activities:

Bruno: A single player and two player chess
activity. It shows the children the possibilities of each pieces and
is very easy to win against at first levels.

Bruno: An activity where the children listen to the
sound sequence played, and reproduce it by clicking on xylophone's
bars.

Siddhesh Suthar (part of GSoC): The children is
proposed a set of words. Each word is shown with a voice, a text and
an image. When done, an exercise asks him to find the right word given
the voice.

Pulkit Gupta: A puzzle with famous paintings.

Johnny Jazeix, A reading practice activity. Some
words are moving, it trains the children to read.

Sagar Chand Agarwal (part of GSoC): A scientific
simulation where the children click on the different stages to make up
the power supply.

Sagar Chand Agarwal (part of GSoC): The water
system. In it, the children has to click on different active elements:
sun, cloud, pumping station, and the sewage treatment plant, in order
to reactivate the entire water system.

Holger: A fine motor skill practice activity. The
children must navigate the ball to the door. Be careful to not make it
fall into the holes. On mobile it uses the accelerometer. For this
activity we have integrated the box2d engine (
https://github.com/qml-box2d/qml-box2d ).

Rajdeep Kaur: The classical hangman. The children
must guess the letters of the given word. To help, on every wrong try,
a part of the image representing the word will be revealed.

A loading overlay is now available to let the user know that some
actions (loading a level in an activity for example) is taking place
and can take some seconds. We also fixed visual glitches in some
activities due to a misuse of ColorOverlay and Colorize items.

Thanks to all of you who step by step make GCompris the outstanding
educational software it is now.

So far 2 years after the start of the Qt Quick port we completed
the rewrite of 114 activities out of the 140 of the Gtk+version. You
can check
the status
of the port. If we keep this momentum we can expect to announce
the completion of the port somewhere next year.

If you want to help, please make some posts in your community about GCompris.

The source code tarball
is available
here (GNU/Linux packagers are welcome)

Voices:

The Randa meeting is an
annual KDE sprint that takes place in Randa, Switzerland from the 6th
to the 13th of September.

Participants donate their time to help improve the software you love
and this is why we need money to cover hard expenses like
accommodation and travel to get the volunteer contributors to
Randa. The Randa Meetings will benefit everyone who uses KDE software.

This year, the GCompris team will go to Randa Meetings to continue and
finalize the Qt Quick port. After one and a half year of development
we ported
100 activities on the 140 of the Gtk+ version. We have several
activities in the pipe coming from our Google of Code students. In
Randa we will continue the review and integration of the pending
activities, and define how we will implement the most challenging ones
that remains to be ported. We will also take this opportunity to
record the voice of any
participant to improve our international support.

You can support
the Randa
Meetings by making a donation, following the official page.

One year ago we made the hard decision to fully rewrite GCompris in QtQuick in order to address tablet users while keeping PC compatibility. As you can imagine it is a daunting task and something for sure that cannot be done alone. Thanks to the help of the many contributors who joined the project we have been able to port 86 activities out of the 140 of the legacy version in a year. See the status report. We hope to complete the port in the coming year. We continue to polish the new version every day but we already provide a better user experience than the legacy version.

We would like to take this opportunity to thanks the KDE community at large who took us under its cute umbrella and allowed us to attract numerous contributors, developers, translators and provided us development support.

As you will see, the full Android version is sold for 6€ now but the price will have to be adjusted to find the optimal one. Software development is a lot of work, paying for GCompris is a good way to reward us and give us the opportunity to sustain the development on our beloved project. Another very easy way to help us is to share the news and rate us on Google play.

Help us bring new improved and unified graphics

2014-12-04

We are launching a crowd funding campain with the goal to bring a new improved and unified graphics to GCompris.

Currently the graphics are one of the weakest part, as they were mostly done by the developers, using free graphics assets and sparse graphic artist contributions.

To address this problem, we found Timothée Giet, a talented graphic artist interested in working on a complete graphics redesign. He is a long standing Free-Software contributor, active member of the Krita team and so part of the KDE community.

Be a part of bringing reading, writing, and arithmetic to 250 million kids.

XPRIZE has launched the Global Learning XPRIZE to incentivize teams to create tablet-based Open Source software that will teach a child to read, write, and perform arithmetic, fully autonomously. The impact of this technology is to bring literacy to over 250 million children around the world. Give a child the gift of literacy.

Do you think GCompris has something to bring and should participate. Do you have ideas on how to reach this goal? Join the GCompris developer mailing list and tell us, we need your feedback, we need you.

KDE Randa Meeting

2014-06-10

GCompris coding session in the Alps

GCompris is now officially a KDE application. As such, our development
community is proud to participate for the first time to
the KDE Randa meeting.
This is an excellent opportunity for the GCompris developers to meet
in real life and get in touch with experienced KDE developers.
Please
consider making
a donation to help us finance this development sprint.

Release 14.05

2014-06-01

Major fixes

Exclude known symbol fonts from the font selector

Now the python path separator is ';' on
windows. Before that it was not possible to install GCompris on
another disk drive on Windows (other than C:)

Just a little video
showing a gimpse of our progress on the port of GCompris in Qt
Quick. So far we already have 44 activities on the 144. We now have a
configuration dialog box and a menu similar to the old version.﻿

Release 14.03

2014-03-29

Major feature

Added support for multigraph languages in click_on_letter by
GunChleoc.

Added a font selector in the config dialog box by Bruno Coudoin.
This feature replaces the skin selector. Removed the skin gartoon as
it is useless now.

Minor changes

Replaced torta py pastel in Spanish text exercise

Added support for localized sound by GunChleoc. The 'yummy yummy'
gnumch voice can now be translated in voices/$LOCALE/misc/eat.wav

Added a cute background to hexagon by Bruno Coudoin.
The background comes from openclipart.org.

Updated FSF's address by Daniel Mustieles.

Geography, fixed reference to sri_lanka.ogg by Bruno Coudoin.

Hangman, added missing word files by Bruno Coudoin. The Scottish
Gaelic word list was not installed. Added a French word list. Fixed
support for accentuated letters. The code that also check for
accentuated letter in the word to find was broken.

Fixed administration to accept UTF-8 user entries by Bruno Coudoin.

Fixed login by text entry by Bruno Coudoin.

Fixed admin log list, user 0 was missing by Bruno Coudoin.

Fixed a typo in the help ctrl-x is now ctrl-q by Bruno Coudoin.

Awale activity, fixes some bugs especially party end by Nicolas
Adenis-Lamarre.

Lang, fixed a python exec error case by Bruno Coudoin. If we have
an error in the startup sequence a variable was used non
initialized.

Lang activity, replaced http://laske.fr/abecedarium/ by our own
online version at http://gcompris.net/activity/lang (global replace
in the code and the translations).

Administration, layout improvement by Bruno Coudoin. the module
labels was too large. replaced them by tooltips.

Change back our licence file to properly report GPLV3+

Fixed selection of internal gnuchess by default by Cosimo Cecchi

click-on-letter, added french accentuated letters.

gnumch, fixed localization of eat.wav. A localize eat.wav can be
provided in voices/$LOCALE/misc/eat.wav

Translation update

Fixed Russian translation by Stas Solovey.

Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Adorilson Bezerra.

Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Enrico Nicoletto.

Updated Brazilian Portuguese translation by Rafael Ferreira.

Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký.

Updated Danish translation by Joe Hansen.

Updated Dutch translation master by Herman van Beem.

Updated French translation by Bruno Coudoin.

Updated Galician translation by Gonçalo Cordeiro

Updated German translation by Christian Kirbach.

Updated Greek translation by Yannis Kaskamanidis.

Updated Hungarian translation by Gabor Kelemen

Updated Lithuanian translation by Aurimas Černius.

Updated Scottish Gaelic translation by GunChleoc.

Updated Serbian translation by Мирослав Николић.

Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles.

Updated Spanish translation by Milagros Alessandra Infante Montero.

Updated Spanish translation by Rafael Ferreira

Updated russian word list by Mayya Sharipova.

Updated word list for gd by GunChleoc.

Updated English voice by Philip Morris and Julia Wycherley

GCompris's future

2014-02-09

I have been particularly discreet for several months. It is not a sign of
disinterest in this project, quiet the opposite.

In fact as you imagine, many users are requesting us a tablet version
of GCompris and I tried to evaluate the different technical
possibilities to bring GCompris to this world. Sadly, Gtk+ the core
technology we are based on does not provide any easy way to run on
tablet.

The main requirements for me was to be able to have a single code base
that would let us target the main desktops and the main tablets.

After looking at different options, I settled
on Qt
Quick. It is a modern toolkit based on a novative descriptive
language called QML that let you describe the user interface,
javascript that complement it to code the game logic. It is also
possible to develop the non graphical part of the application in C++
with Qt.

It is based on an OpenGL scene graph, we can create shader and
particles to make graphical effects and do smooth animations.

In order to validate this choice, I did a prototype and this convinced
me that it was a pertinent choice for GCompris. Even if this is a new
technology, the learning curve is acceptable, with very few code you
can create a very good looking activitiy. In my test it takes about
half the lines of code to make the same activity in Qt Quick than we
used to in Python and we get a better graphical quality.

The bad news is that it is not compatible with the current version of
GCompris and it requires a full rewrite. All we can keep is the game
logic and tuning, the texts, the translations, the graphics and the
sounds.

For those who don't want to compile it, you can look at
the little
video.

Another important point, since this is not based on Gtk+ this new
version cannot be hosted by Gnome as we used to do. Therefore we
cannot participate in the Google Summer of Code under the Gnome
umbrella. I thus registered GCompris for this year session of GSoC and
Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes accepted to be the official
co-mentor.

If you are interested in helping GCompris, I encourage you to learn Qt
Quick and to help port some activities. This is a good opportunity to
learn a new technology while doing something useful. I still have to
refine and document the process to create a new activity but it is not
very complex.

GCompris on Gtk+ has been around for 14 years. It is true that the
migration will take time, probably several years but this is something
we have to do if we want to stay relevant in the coming years.

Bruno.

Release 13.11

2013-11-04

Major features

A new activity in the reading section that presents a
set of image, text and voice to children and an exercise set around
them. This includes about 1000 images and voices in English, Spanish,
French, and Gaelic-Scottish. The images and voices come from
the Art4Apps project, a big
thanks to them for providing a such useful resource (under
CC BY-SA). If you want to thanks Art4Apps for their hard work
please consider making a donation on their site.

If you want to have a look at what this new activity
is about, you can play it
online.

A rework of many text related activities to support multigraph
languages. This is driven by a team of Gaelic-Scottish users.

Added the font face use in GCompris in the skin
configuration file. It is possible to select another font by manually
changing it with one installed on your system. For example, In
boards/skin/babytoy/skin.xml find the line "font
id="gcompris/fontface" name="sans" and replace "sans" by "ruluko".
Ruluko is a
font provided by Google under
the SIL Open Font License 1.1
designated to aid those learning to read. In the future selecting the
font should be made available at the configuration level.

Bug fixes

By popular demand, there is now a simplified version
of the submarine activity, now there is an easy first level. Added
tooltips to explain items.

Fixed a crash case after leaving intro and land_safe activity.

New country map of Scotland by Fòram na Gàidhlig.

Fixed colors values in the advanced color
activity. This
page reports the old and new value.

Added support for remembering last passed level by Roopesh Shenoy.
With this option when the children enters an activity the last
succeeded level is proposed.

This new one is no more based on a CMS engine but is coded in python
with the jinja2 template engine
and generated statically.

The site is now generated on the fly including the screenshots
pages. Very important, the new site translation is managed through po
files like the GCompris code base making it easier for translators to
localize the web site.

You don’t imagine the number of people complaining the GCompris does not run on tablet, phone and tv. It is way too much work to port it. I am glad to show the world that choosing the proper hardware, developers don’t have to recode everything.

hangman: unsupported locale in GCompris was making this activity crash. Fixes bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662576

core: now handle the ’C’ locale as en_US Currently a ’C’ locale was interpreted in GCompris by Catalan.

Translations updates

Updated Albanian translation by Abdulsalem Osmani

Fixed spelling mistake in Norwegian Nynorsk by Karl Ove Hufthammer

Updated Greek translation for gcompris by Yannis Kaskamanidis

Updated Slovenian translation by Matej Urbančič

Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký

Updated German translation by Mario Blättermann

Updated Turkish translation by Muhammet Kara

Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles

Updated Spanish translation by Daniel Mustieles

Release 11.09

2011-09-25

New Activities

A set of activities to discover the Braille system. They have been made by Srishti Sethi this summer (part of the Gnome Summer of Code):

The history of Louis Braille

Discover the Braille system

Training using a funny game, like falling letters but with Braille

Braille lotto to remember Braille numbers.

click on letter uppercase: same as click on letter but with only upper case. Now the old activity ’click on letter’ poposes only lower case.

Activity updates

erase activity: added new animals from picture by Adrien Grellier and Claire Gegout from their Antarctic trip.

shapegame activities: now we display the ok button when all shapes are placed even with errors We also show a red cross indicating the children errors. Thanks to Arnaud Limon for the suggestion. Fixed a potential crash when a piece was overwritten by another in their wrong position.

Changed the combo locale system to display the language in their textual form instead of their locale code. Maintain them sorted to make it even easier to use. Now activites with locale configuration use this feature.

Mostly full rewrite of the click on letter activity to allow a specific configuration per language and per user. Now this activity takes a desktop formated file as input. It contains for each level the questions and answers charaters to propose. This file can be edited in the game through the config button, in this case a local data file is save under the user’s My GCompris folder and is reused. Now for each country we must provide a data file, this is much better than before where it was fully random and was not respecting the natural difficulties of a language. If this file is missing we create the level automatically from the alphabet (or from the english one for Latin based alphabet) now display the text of the question if we cannot play it for any reason which makes this activity playable even if we don’t have the voice set or the sound is disabled. Also if one letter is missing from the voice set it remains playable. Improved the graphism. based on an openclipart image. Splitted click on letter in two activities, on with lowercase one with uppercase as suggested by Sylvain Dechy.

memory sound activity: the tux band background image with the bsd devil is considered offensive in some country. Now the bsd devil looks less like a devil and more like a red little boy.

wordsgame activity: changed the text color of the falling words to be back and white I found out that reading text in color other than black and white is very hard.

In login.py and tuxpaint, reactivated the config button that was missing.

memory activity: fixed several potential crash cases when the memory was run with sound disabled.

Now in the hangman, we display the name of the current language.

Advanced color activity: fixed color names not to include _ when composed of 2 names.

Fixed the 2 click drag mode ( run it with gcompris -g 2clicks).

findit: no more ask several times a missing answer at the end of the level

bar: added the keyboard shortcut ctrl-b do hide/show the GCompris control bar. Now when changing the level, the sound is played before starting the activity in order not to flush the own activity sound.

advanced_color: remade this activity based on the new findit engine.

details-activity: Fixed the TajMahal level. References to images was wrong.

Voices

New voice set for Thai by Thummarat Phromphing

English voices: new recordset of our english voices by Julia Wycherley with the help of Philip Morris.

Google Summer of Code

2011-05-18

We have 2 students working on GCompris this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code 2011. This year for the first time I proposed GCompris as a project and myself as a mentor.

Srishti will be working on adding activities to let non blind children discover the blind world by learning the Braille code.

Karthik will let our children discover the music world, an important domain in which GCompris is weak.

Release 9.6.1

2011-04-03

This is a bug fix release that includes the following changes:

submarine: Reworked it deeply. It had several stability issues. At the same time, improved the graphism a little bit. Fixed major crash in submarine that arrived when the children won.

click and draw: Fixed, it was not starting at all.

renewable energy: On some system the wind farm was taking too much CPU.

Release 9.6

2011-03-05

New features

Added 2 new activities to learn to give money make in a shop. This is based on the money activity but now the children must give back money to Tux.

Now the erase activity reads the .jpg file in its data directory instead of being hardcoded. In the erase activity we have a large number of animal backgrounds. Now these are found at run time instead of being hard coded. Also the user can add its own images in the directory /My GCompris/erase. Added more animal images taken from wikipedia.

New renewable energy activity. Learn about electric dam, wind farm and solar panels works. This is heavily based on the watercycle activity.

In money activity, we no more auto check the answer, there is now an OK button Created 3 price categories in money activtiy to make the game more realistic. As suggested by Arnaud Champollion, it is just too easy for the children.

improved the drawnumber activity to have its dataset taken from a file instead of hardcoded. Now we have a text file named activity.txt that contains the images and points coordinate. converted .png files in .jpg in drawnumber activity to save disk space.

Bug Fixes

In the submarine activity, we now destroy and reset the frigate motion when we enter the help. Not doing so makes the children loose the game while reading the manual.

Added a reset button for the locale in the configuration dialog. It is now easier to get back on the default locale. Sorted the locales following their english name instead of the locale code

Deadlock occurs if new playback is scheduled from callback. Observed with sound-memory activity, while playing ’bonus’. In this fix, the sound is player in the gtk idle loop instead of being called directly (Fixed by Andreas Fenkart)

Major random crash fix. In python activity, a call to gcompris.skin.svg_get() was freeing the skin object but it should not. This resulted in random crashes at any point in GCompris when trying to read the skin svg_handle.

Fixed code to compile with the -Werror=unused-but-set-variable gcc new compilation flag.

Fixed invisible cursor on 64 bits systems. The propoerty struct is now properly initialized even on 64 bits systems. Fixed by Peter Ujfalusi.

Watercycle activity: Added toolips to explain the different items. Fixed a minor race issue. Added a bonus flower feedback in watercycle to let the children knows he completed the level. Thanks to Clara Coudoin for the feedback, it is great to have close beta testers.

Updated translation and added new word list for Afrikaans (af) by Friedel Wolff

Updated German translation by Mario Blättermann

Updated Russian translation by Yuri Myasoedov

New translation for Zulu by Priscilla Mahlangu

Release 9.4 (2010/11/06) / 9.5

2010-12-06

Warning: Due to a last minute packaging issue, this release has been re-issued under the number 9.5.

Major changes

Fixed level 8 of babyshapes. The makefile was missing all the images for this level. I reworked the files so that they lie in the resource directory instead of subdirectories.

New hangman activity. Icon is a a modified one from Mathieu’s icon set. The cute background is based on a drawing Franck Doucet made for our bargame activity. This activity uses our default-.xml files to propose words to the children. It is thus very important now to have them properly filled. For now I did the work for English and French. Translators, please refer to this page for instructions

Added details activity by Marc Levivier. In the spirit of famous painting discovery, in this activity the painting is complete and the children must put painting parts on the right places.

New feature in the chat activity. The user has a shared white boards now. This has been developped by Fionn Ziegler.

First release of an in progress tool that converts wiktionary xml dumps in an xml file. For now, it works only for French, this page tracks the progress. The idea behind this is to get an xml formatted dictionnary to create new activities in the reading / writing area. For now this is just not used in GCompris.

In planegame now the numbers are spoken when the plane hit the correct cloud.

Added missing configuration button in several activites where it makes sense. Now teachers / children can set force uppercase in click on letter, falling wards, falling letter, horizontal/vertical reading. Thanks to Luciana from sleducacional.org

Added missing level for photohunter by Marc Levivier

Added the option —disable-level. Some teacher want to be sure the children don’t skip a level.

Now the click on letter activity can be played also with the keybord. This has been suggested by Sini Ruohomaa.

Fixed reference to tuxpaint dataset. Now we display saved tuxpaint images in our image selector again. Thanks to the person in Latinoware 2010 who reported me that this feature has been lost.

The configuration of the ’missing letter’ activity was not working for UTF-8 multibyte characters (bugzilla). Added a tooltip to better explain the different fields.

Refined the sudoku’s level for scholl usage (By Sylvain Dechy).

Changed the difficulty level of the maze activity to make it more usable in classrooms. (By Sylvain Dechy)

Voices

New voice set for Slovenian by Saša Batistič

Translations

As for each release, many translation have been updated

Alan Monfort (br)

Aleksey Lim (es)

Andrej Žnidaršič (sl)

Bruno Brouard (fr)

Christian Kirbach (de)

Fran Diéguez (gl)

Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes (pt_BR)

Gabor Kelemen (hu)

Giannis Kaskamanidis (el)

Gonçalo Cordeiro (gl)

Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio (eu)

Joe Hansen (da)

Jorge González (es)

Karl Ove Hufthammer (nn)

Mantas Kriaučiūnas (lt)

Marek Černocký (cs)

Mario Blättermann (de)

Petr Kovar (cs)

Reuma Mordechai (he)

Xandru Armesto (ast)

Yannis Kaskamanidis (el)

Introducing http://sleducacional.org/

2010-11-27

Back from Latinoware in Brazil, it was a great experience for me to
go that far and discover how much GCompris is appreciated.

I met the organisation sleducational.org which is focused on free
software in education and driven by teachers. They are making a great
job in explaining how free software can be used in day to day
training. They know pretty well GCompris since Frederico, the team
leader, is also the translator of GCompris in Brazilian
Portuguese.

To me, it is an excellent news to see an organisation taking our
work further and providing a local support to teachers in Brazil
looking for educational tools.

Also, I got a lot of feedback and this is mandatory to make sure we
continue to be focused on the needs of our users.

And of course it gave me a lot of new ideas for GCompris, just need
to find some time to code, hopefully when the release 9.4 will be
released.

PS: The mug offered by sleducacional to Bruno.

Bruno goes to Brazil

2010-10-10

I will be in Brazil at Latinoware 2010 from the 10th to the 12th of
November.

It will be a pleasure to meat you there and discuss about the
future of GCompris.

Release 9.3

2010-04-27

This version is a minor update of the 9.2. The main new feature is that we now distribute a MacOSX version (Intel 10.4 and above).

Minor changes

Fixed superbrain by Julian Gilbey. In some case the proposesed solution was wrong. This is a long lasting bug.

Added support for MacOSX 10.4 Intel.

Updated icons to reflect latest art work.

Removed flags from GCompris. Flags create political issue. There is not always a clear relationship between a country flag and a language.

Fixed a typo in sudoku tutorial.

Improved graphism new skins babytoy by Cabaraux Stephane.

Improved many graphism (connect4, ballcatch) by Cabaraux Stephane.

Added a copy of gnome-gnuchess internally since the regular gnuchess crashes on macosx. This is activated only on MacOSX.

Fixed missing translation request for the "Yes I Saw it" string in the reading activity.

Workaround for the fullscreen mode on macosx. now set a huge max ratio hint when fullscreen is set.

Added an ongoing progress status at GCompris startup. This is used to avoid the long delay at startup without user feedback.

Fixed the audio tooltip in the bar.

Fixed a segfault in the GCompris dialog box.

New activity lights off by Bruno and Clement Coudoin. Added more simple levels in lightsoff.

More art work content for photohunter activity Contributed by Marc Levivier Based on paintings by Le Douanier Rousseau.

Improved wordsgame activity to support language selection.

Fixed score counting in advanced color

Now we give 4 chances at each sublevel. After that the sublevel restarts.

Fixed redraw activity, several level was impossible to complete. There was many colors in the image target that was impossible to do.

Fixed SDL audio backend to allow playing with effects and no backgroundd music.

New feature

Fixed bugs

Fixed geography activities. Many dot where missing, hidden by the background.

Fixed drawn case in the chess activity, it was ending in an infinite loop.

Improved a little bit the layout in the penalty activity.

Replaced the yellow by white the text color of the score.

Now the text dialog is centered in the height.

Added an API entry to get the current cursor. This allow the help dialog to get the previous cursor, set the default one and change again to the caller one in the end.

In erase activity, the sponge cursor is setback when exiting the pause state. This allow the about box to set the default cursor which is more suitable.

In the menu, the display of the description is now centered. Minor change, better layout.

In python, now import sqlite3 instead of pysqlite2 For backyard compatibility, there is a fall back to sill import pysqlite2.

Added a missing background to the simple color activity It is based on the artwork of Mathieu Ignacio (from the target activity.)

Fixed algebra activity to report the level properly.

Better error checking in case the database cannot be loaded or created. Before that patch, a failure was exiting the startup sequence without warning the user Now, in case we cannot load the database of cannot created it we follow the procedure: - rename the database under the name gcompris_db.broken - recreate it from scratch - we failed again, fall back in no database mode.

In short, this release is a bug fix release of the 9.0. It is
mandatory for all packager to use this one due to the large number of
problems we fixed.

You get the tarball at the usual place on Sourceforge

If you prefer, on the git side, this comes from the ’gcomprixogoo’ branch.

If full, the change log is:

Core fixes

Added support of Sugar look and feel by Aleksey Lim

Now the group menus are ordered based on an embedded difficulty level so that they appear in the same order.

Fixes to compile with GTK 2.19 by Johan Cwiklinski

Removed unused import rsvg in watercycle and penalty. PACKAGERS: This mean we no more need on python-rsvg.

Activity fixes

scale Added a sign on the scale The scale activity is sometimes annoying because you cannot easiliy see which side the scale goes. I added a sign < > or = on it to ease the task.

photo hunter Major rework of he photo hunter activity that can now detect the image difference automagically. This makes it easy to contribute new data set to this activity, just provide it 2 images having some differences. BTW, I added some more content to it. Photo hunter has been fixed to work in full screen and now has an explanation string when started

erase Fixed events on the canvas that where not taken in account. Now clicking beside the fish does speed them like it was before.

reversecount Fixed reversecount, it was not restarting on loose case. Now when the children loose he restarts the same level.

follow line Adapted the follow line to work on touch screen. This was reported by Ronny Standtke. Now not only the motion events are catched but also click events.

animation activity Added tooltip in the animation activity.

smallnumber Fixed a crash case in smallnumber activity. This has also been improved to avoid overlaps of dices. Fixed smallnumber2 activity regarding dice pair not close enough.

electricity Fixed electricity activity, image was referenced badly.

geography Added translation on tooltips in the geography activity.

missingletter Fixed missingletter crash uppon changing its locale.

erase double click Reintroduced the erase double click activity.

memory word number Fixed memory word number activity. It was broken related to translations.

smallnumber No more display the sublevel 11/10.

ball catch Added the manual in the first start of ballcatch.

traffic Simplified level for traffic. A contribution from a French teacher Sylvain Dechy who teaches in Hérimoncourt. This introduces a set of simplified level in the traffic activity best suited for children.

tuxpaint Fixed tuxpaint activity. Was completely broken.

memory sound Now in memory_sound activity the intro is heard.

melody Added an OK button to start the melody activity. This avoids the intro voice to be skipped.

Translation updates

Updated Ukrainian translation by Ivan Onyshchuk

Updated French translation by Bruno Coudoin

Updated Hungarian translation by Gabor Kelemen

Updated Czech translation by Marek Černocký

Updated Simplified Chinese translation by Ray Wang

Updated Arabic translation by Khaled Hosny

Updated Afrikaans translation by Friedel Wolff

Updated Portuguese translation by Duarte Loreto

Updated Czech translation by Marek Cernocky

Updated Bulgarian translation by Alexander Shopov

Updated Brazilian Portuguese by Frederico Goncalves Guimaraes

Voice pack

Several voices where not played due to name mismatch

Added a new Chinese voice set read out by Feng Jie and others, translated and post processed by littlebat at http://www.learndiary.com/

Release 9.0

2010-01-03

After two years of work, the GCompris development team is happy to share with you the release of the version 9.0.

GCompris is almost 10 years old and it required some deep code restructuring. This release brings many mandatory changes to make it easier to enhance, maintain and distribute.

The first major change has been driven by the Sugar community. On the XO there was a need to distribute the activities individually. Since the early days of GCompris, we had properly separated the core engine and the activities but the laters were shared in a single folder. Now each activity in GCompris have a single directory. This includes its code and its data (menu, icon, images, sounds, data set).

Beside allowing per activity distribution, it is also makes it easier to contribute to GCompris, there is even an activity called pythontemplate that can be used as a starting point to create your own.

The second major change has been to replace the old, unmaintained gnome-canvas toolkit by the more modern, Cairo based toolkit named goocanvas. This makes the rendering of GCompris much better, we now have an alpha channel and the antialiasing.

The third change is our skin format that is now fully SVG based and uses the elements IDs. This way creating a skin can be done by editing a single file instead of 70 files.

The last change is the image ratio (width versus height). In the old version we were using 800x600 (4/3) and could only do fullscreen by changing the screen resolution. Now, to accomodate newer monitors, we are using the 800x520 resolution which is wider. But GCompris playing area is not smaller because we managed to replace the big button bar to something more integrated. The full screen is done by rescaling ourself, you can even rescale GCompris in window mode.

A good side effect is that GCompris can be used on big monitor and on smaller devices.

Beside the major changes, there has been a lot of minor changes all around, it would take too many time to report all of them.

At least, I have to mention

The new graphism from Stephane Cabaraux for the canal lock and water cycle activities.

The new photo hunter activity by Marc Le Douarain

More famous paintings by Marc Levivier.

A full rewrite of the animation activity that allows now editing previous frames at will with a time line.

A new mode for our scale activity where the children now learn the weight units gram and kilo by Wolfram Sang.

I you can see, we make a lot of work and now we need your help to report us bugs or send patches to stabilize it.

Thanks to all the contributors and supporters of all kinds who provide help to GCompris.

Windows users, please be patient, I will work on it as soon as the 9.0 is stabilized.

Release 8.4.9

2009-03-09

I would like first to apologise towards the Portuguese children and teachers who have faced the translation issue.

A special thanks to our Gnome Portuguese translation team, Duarte Loreto and António Lima. They spent the week-end working on a rework of the translation under the pressure of the bad press we have been facing in some Portugal’s news paper.

GCompris supports over 50 languages and its a community based effort. Yes in some case we may ship incomplete or incorrect translations. We have always considered that we need to start somewhere and that an incomplete translation is better than no translation at all. This has worked pretty well so far because once people sees that the translation is not correct they join the project to improve it.

Over the years, the Gnome Translation team gets stronger but for historical reason I kept the bad custom to release po files myself. I now understand how wrong I was. I call again the Gnome translation team to take over the languages I still commit myself. You can find which in the po/ChangeLog file.

So this is pretty unusual for us to be in the headline. I hope this will calm down so we can go back to what we like to do, help the children learning.

Now the release notes for the 8.4.9

Fixes to compile on Ubuntu 8.10

Improved robustness, fixed potential crash cases

Miguel DE Izarra implemented a word selector. Now the teacher can easily put their own words in the reading and falling word activities.

Integrated several patches from Vitali Perchonok related to Right to Left languages support.

Matieu Ignacio: New original background for the target activity.

Vitali Perchonok provided several images from OpenClipart to replace ours.

Miguel De Izarra added support for a network mode to let teachers centralise their customisations. This save custom data in user_dir and make a content.txt (a md5sum like file) listing custom files. Simply put this files in a web server to diffuse in classroom. GCompris clients are launched with —server

Miquel De Izarra Added support for editing the content of the missing letter activity.

Fixed the empty date field in the admin section on Windows.

Now properly points use images in My GCompris/Images In the animation activity, the image selector will display all images from this directory.

gnet library is now enabled by default at compile time.

Voices in Punjabi by Ankit Sahai

Translation updates

af.po: Created translation for Afrikaans by Friedel Wolff and Samuel Murray